Manage members

Members are the people who signed up on your portal to ask and answer questions, your customers and community, as opposed to your staff (see Invite team members & roles for those). The Members page lists them all in one place, so you can find someone, review their activity, and step in when an account is causing trouble.

Like moderation (see Moderate your portal), member management happens on the portal itself, not in a separate back office. Open it from your avatar menu in the top-right corner of the portal, then Members.

Who can see it

The Members page is open to owners, admins, and agents. That is the same group that moderates content on the portal: if you can already close a question or delete a reply, you can manage members too. A Finance teammate, whose seat is billing-only, does not see the menu item.

Finding a member

The members are shown in a table: display name, email, the date they joined, how many questions and answers they have posted, and their status (active or suspended). Use the search box at the top to filter by name or email, and the dropdown next to it to choose how many rows to show per page (10, 25, 50, or 100). That choice is remembered in your browser.

Each row’s Actions column has two icon buttons: one takes you to that member’s public profile on your portal (so you can see exactly what visitors see), and the other suspends or reactivates the account (covered next).

Suspending a member

When someone is spamming, abusive, or otherwise needs to be stopped, open the Members page and click the suspend icon in their row’s Actions column. You will be asked to confirm first.

A suspended member:

Cannot post questions, post answers, or vote.
Cannot edit their profile.

A suspended member can still browse your portal and read everything that is publicly visible, exactly like a signed-out visitor. Suspension is about stopping them from contributing, not hiding your content from them.

Two things suspension does not do today:

It does not sign them out of an existing session, and it does not stop them from signing in again. It takes effect on their next action: the moment they try to post, answer, vote, or edit their profile, they are blocked.
It does not delete anything they have already posted. Their existing questions and answers stay on the portal. To remove specific content, use the moderation tools described in Moderate your portal.

Reactivating a member

Suspension is always reversible. Open the Members page, find the suspended member (their row’s status column shows a Suspended badge), and click the reactivate icon in their Actions column. They can post, answer, vote, and edit their profile again right away.

Erasing a member

Suspension stops someone from posting; erasure is different, it permanently deletes what belongs to them, for when a member exercises their right to erasure (GDPR “right to be forgotten”). Erasure is available to owners and admins only, one step further restricted than the rest of this page.

What gets deleted

Erasing a member permanently removes:

Questions they asked (in their personal capacity as a member), along with every reply underneath them, from anyone, staff included. The whole thread goes with its root, because the root belongs to the person who asked it.
Replies they wrote in their personal capacity, wherever they posted them.
All their votes.
Their profile and sign-in data: email, display name, avatar, and sessions.

What’s kept

If the member was ever on your team, anything they wrote while acting as staff is treated differently: those questions and replies stay on your portal. Official answers belong to the forum, not to whoever happened to be signed in when they wrote them. Instead of being deleted, that content is anonymized: the author is unlinked and the portal shows it as “{your forum} Team” rather than their name, exactly like any other staff-authored content once its author has moved on (see Staff profiles & badges).

If a reply they personally authored had been marked the accepted solution, erasing them unmarks it; the question goes back to unsolved rather than keeping a solution credited to someone who no longer has an account.

Before you confirm: the exact numbers

Erasure is permanent, so before you can confirm it you’re shown a preview of exactly what will happen: how many questions and replies will be purged, how much of their content will instead be retained and anonymized, and how many votes will be removed. Nothing is deleted until you’ve seen those numbers and confirmed.

Members deleting their own account

A member does not have to wait on staff to exercise their right to erasure: they can delete their own account directly from their profile page on the portal (the same page where they edit their display name and avatar). It uses the exact same rules described above under “What gets deleted” and “What’s kept”, the only difference is that no staff member needs to act, and there is no confirm-by-name step, they instead type their own email address to confirm, immediately before the deletion happens.

Self-deletion is for members only. Anyone on the team (owner, admin, agent, or finance) cannot delete their account from the portal: a staff account is deleted by an owner or admin removing them from the team on the dashboard, which deletes the account with these same rules (see Invite team members & roles). The owner has to go one step further and transfer ownership or delete the forum first, since a forum can’t exist without an owner (see Delete your forum or account).

Self-deletion only works from a signed-in portal session: it is deliberately not available through an API key, so an exposed key can never be used to delete the account of the person who created it.